James Mansion wrote:
complete with some suggestions for the future and what I think
it will take for it to really succeed - mostly time.
Darren,
You suggest that it is a 'problem' that contributing to Open Solaris is
a contribution to Sun. As a user, that is precisely one of Open
Solaris' strengths. And if that means that the sort of person who has
a problem with that doesn't contribute, then I'm personally overjoyed.
Good riddance. Let them work in their communes. When they grow up and
get lives (and significant others, and kids, and all those things that
make adults' time precious) and careers that depend on technology
they'll start to understand.
And they start to find it hard to make time to spend time on
anything that isn't work - ie open source projects. I've seen
this happen on a number of occasions. And contrary to what
you're suggesting, they don't turn up an opensolaris, sometime
later (or at least none have, yet.)
Its not as if the stuff is hoarded by Sun. Its not as if Red Hat
don't benefit from contributions to Linux.
Indeed and the same could be said for IBM and others.
But with OpenSolaris the connection is much more obvious.
If I contribute to some random package that Red Hat ships,
sure, I am in part contributing to Red Hat's offering, but
I am also contributing to that project by itself and to
every other person that uses it. But most of all, I am
first and foremost contributing to that standalone project.
You seem keen on students. I doubt anything I wrote as a student
or newbie grad would survive any sort of review I'd make now,
though.
You're missing the point of the importance of students and
what happens in the open source world. I suppose the closest
I can come up with as a model is how people pick and choose
their political tendencies and once chosen, they almost never
change.
If the community is going to grow then we need to grow it from
the roots by planting seeds in the right places where they will
grow.
Or ... lets see, if someone gets deep into a community, working
on some open source project, makes lots of friends, etc, then
spends some years doing the family thing, where do you really
think they'll go when they have free time again? To some new
group or back where they'd made friends, etc, and already
have some sense of community? (Chances are they never stopped
reading the email, etc, they just stopped being really active.)
Open source communities are more than just people making code
changes, it's a group of people who have similar ideals, not
just about what form the code should take, but over intellectual
rights, and other things. I suppose one might say that changing
OpenSolaris to GPLvX might make it appeal to more Linux-like
people but I can't see that happening. Linux's appeal is more
than just the GPL and failing to understand that will lead to
failed attempts to copy it.
management at Sun needs to step back, to the point where managers,
directors, VPs, etc, should have no involvment with the project
as an employee or agent of Sun
If you really want Open Solaris to be 'just another' open source OS,
then fine - but what you're saying is that developers matter most, and
that sucks. Users should matter most, and developers (particularly
on open source projects) are notoriously bad at putting 'mere'
users needs first. Management MUST give strong guidence to make
sure that Open Solaris remains close to 'Sun Solaris' and that
'Sun Solaris' aligns with users' needs, whether or not that alignment
means doing uncool and boring things. Which it will.
I don't know any open source developers who would consider
the needs of users as being unimportant. The point of my
comment (which you seen to have missed) isn't that developers
are more important than users but that open source projects
dont need managers, directors, VPs, etc, to drive them and
that their inclusion in opensolaris makes it difficult to argue
that OpenSolaris is being directed by the community at large
and not by Sun. I think if you went to any reputable open
source project and asserted that it cared more about its
developers than its users, you'd be in for a rough ride.
What you're confusing here is what OpenSolaris is with what
Solaris is. There is no reason that Sun can't continue to
build a product called Solaris that is a distribution of the
open source product known as "OpenSolaris".
Just as Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not the same as Linux,
so to I expect that over time, Solaris will become different
to OpenSolaris. Just how different they become and over what
time frame, I cannot say.
If Sun loses focus and cannot ratin (and to some extent regain)
traction in the datacentre then its lost. Its much more important
that it succeed at that than that Open Solaris is a 'successful open
source project' - who gives a toss about that?
I'm sure someone does otherwise the topic/thread would
never have been broached on this list. The questions you've
got to ask yourself are who/why and more importantly, what
happens if it isn't seen to be a success by those who want it
to be one? Hence the topic of my blog - that to try and judge
it by normal means is fraught and that it needs to live for a
lot longer yet before anyone can even attempt to judge it.
Darren
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